RACK VS. DEVICE PRESETS

It turns out that saving and loading presets is a slightly more interesting topic than you might imagine. Today I’m going to pick up where I left off yesterday with some basics – we’ll get into a more customized approach later in the week.

When I’m talking about saving a Rack as a preset (like the Reverb rack demonstrated yesterday), I’m generally not concerned about the actual effect parameters (decay time and so on). Instead, I’m just interested in saving the configuration of the rack – in this case, how the Macro knobs are mapped.

I actually don’t use effect presets very much. Generally, I’m happy to start off with an effect in it’s default state and tweak to taste. Racks are another story. It can take quite some time to configure a rack, and in the case of yesterday’s example, the entire point of the rack is to save time later, so saving it is absolutely necessary.

To save the new Reverb rack, all you have to do is click the Save switch on the rack. Be aware that there is also a Save switch on the Reverb as well (at the far right) – leave this one alone for the time being.

The new rack will be saved under Audio Effect Rack in the Device Browser. Type in a new name, press Return and you’re done.

I’ve adopted the naming convention of starting all of my default racks with an underscore (“_”). This makes it clear what the preset is, and forces all of the default racks to sort to the top of the list (after any preset folders, as you’ll see above).

The Save switch within the Reverb should only be used to save a particular reverb sound. Presets saved this way will appear under Reverb in the device browser and can be used individually or as part of a rack. More on this tomorrow…